I’ve been using Netflix’s Watch Now feature much more lately mostly because of the excellent Netflix plugin for SageTV that allows me to browse, search, and play the Watch-Now movies from the comfort of my couch.  The plugin has been improved by Morgan (the plug-in developer), but once you start a movie or show there were still some issues controlling everything without pulling out a keyboard and mouse. This has been a stumbler due to the fact that Netflix offers very few keyboard shortcuts for the service. Well, I’ve been tinkering with a program called girder to make my remote control communicate with my PC. And in doing so I discovered a few hidden windows commands that give you more control over the Netflix Watch-Now feature.

Grab your IR receiver and head on over to Brent Evans Geek Tonic for complete instructions (or to just download the gml file).

I’m setting up my SageTV HD100 and a key component is the HDMI cable used to connect the HD media extender to the LCD television. One thing I learned long ago was to not buy theater cables from the big-box retailers, including Best Buy, Circuit City,Walmart , etc. Instead, I save myself a bundle by purchasing online. Why not cave to convenience and purchase at the store? Despite what the kid at the store tells you, those Monster Cable and lesser known “high quality” cables are being sold at huge margins and no noticeable differences in performance.

Best Buy sells the fancy packaged, 16′ Monster Cable - Ultra Series 800 HDMI A/V Cable (not rated for in-wall installation) for the low, low price of $149.99. While Monoprice.com, my favorite cable vendor, sells a HDMI Tin-Plated Copper CL2 Rated (For In-Wall Installation) Cable (22AWG) - 30ft (Gold Plated) for $36.87. Feel free to include shipping fees, and you’re still way below the big-box cost. Delivery is very quick and you’ll end up with a better cable for less. Another retailer with good, inexpensive cables is Newegg.com.

Next time you have a home theater project, do your homework and shop around to save in places you didn’t expect. Trust me, you’ll need that money later for something else in your theater.

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.

Let’s say I win the lottery. Not just a little jackpot, but a really big one. If that happens, this is the home theater I might want to put in my mansion. It costs about $6 million and includes a gigantic, Snowmatte laboratory-grade screen, Sony ultra-high-resolution (4,096-by-2,160) SRX-S110 digital projector, a 8.8-channel audio system with THREE center-channel speakers, SIXTEEN 18-inch Snell Subs, and the list goes on and on. In the end, the setup powers 11,315 high-quality watts in the room designed for the sole purpose of being the ultimate home theater. Is it overkill? Heck yes, but who’s going to judge you when it’s your cash?

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.

If you’ve ever used the myFairTunes or QTFairTunes programs to strip DRM from Apple’s FairPlay or Windows Media encoding, then you’re probably familiar with the Hymn Project. Last week, they received a cease and desist letter demanding that all download links be removed from the site. From their forum:

Until further notice, no links are to be posted anywhere on the site to programs that can strip DRM from any of Apple’s music or videos. Any user who does so will get the link removed and a warning from us. Any further infraction will get you banned permanently. The site will remain open for now and we won’t have a problem as long as we abide by the C&D.

The DRM-removal tools were used by many people on iTunes track to listen to those songs on unsupported players, mobile phones, and other non-Apple devices. One of the site’s administrators speculates that the reason Apple made this move after so much time was possibly related to Requiem, a new program in development, that utilizes file decryption rather of than re-recording music from memory while it is being played (see DoubleTwist).

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a large collection of MP3 music files on your hard drive(s). Some of my MP3s were acquired from places like iTunes and Amazon, while others were ripped from my CD collection. The end result is a pile of MP3s - some with album art, many without.

At home I listen to music via SageTV’s HTPC application and on the road I use an iPod - and it’s always helpful to have album art embedded into the file itself instead of having an additional photo file. MP3 files with embedded album art are just more portable.

For example, if you have a large MP3 collection that you want to transfer to the PS3, you’d want to have album art for each track since the PS3 can only sort one level deep for any media. If you embed album art into your media before transferring to the PS3, you can then group your collection by Artist and consequently view all albums by that artist with pictures for each track showing which album it belongs to. It’s the only decent way to currently use music in the XMB until Sony allows folder structures (and support for folder.jpg type album art on import)

When you have a large audio collection, manually adding album art to MP3s can be very tedious. So, my solution is to automate this process using MP3Tag.

Head on over to Brent Evans Geek Tonic for steps in automatically updating an MP3 collection with album art.

Rakesh from Snapstream has the latest scoop on Hauppauge’s soon-to-be-released HTPC HD PVR device that will encode high definition component input via a cable or satellite set-top box using H.264 at up to 25 Mbps:

• Includes Hauppauge’s IR blaster with code library
• It accepts component video up to 1080p
• The hardware is “basically done” and simply waiting for the final case design
• It’s based on a chip from Ambarella
• It will require a “relatively powerful PC to playback the recordings from this device
• Estimated shipment is expected by 3/31/2008

I first mentioned this device during CES and it’s exciting for HTPC users because it provides a way to get all your HD channels (not just the unencrypted QAM or OTA ones) from cable/satellite boxes without needing CableCARDs. If it works as advertised, it’ll be huge for SageTV, BeyondTV, Media Portal, GBPVR and even Vista Media Center users that don’t own a CableCARD tuner.

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.

When I host a Super Bowl party the things I usually worry about is having enough food, making sure my TV and audio are in working condition and there is enough seating. What else could go wrong?

Picture this. You have a group of people coming over to watch the most watched game of the year - the Super Bowl game on your home theater, projection screen system. Everything is going well, the pre-game is on in the background as people are arriving and all of the sudden the channel goes black. No picture, no sound nothing. You frantically check all the other channels which are all fine. After almost an hour a message finally appears on the screen telling you they are experiencing technical difficulties…

That’s pretty much as close to a Super Bowl party disaster as you can get and it really happened to thousands of viewers in Northwest Arkansas and Southeastern Oklahoma Dish and DirecTV subscribers due to a software glitch at Arkansas FOX affiliate KFTA.

My Dad called to ask me if I was having problems in Kansas City (I wasn’t.) DirecTV put up a message for subscribers to turn to an alternative channel where they were broadcasting the channel from an alternate “local channel” for the game, but Dish Network subscribers like my Dad were out of luck.

The outage lasted until just before the end of the third quarter. For those that waited that long, they did get to see the most exciting quarter of the game (the fourth of course), but there will be a LOT of unhappy people around those parts. And Arkansas people weren’t alone, looks like Nevada had some problems as well.

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.